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feature – design 5 There are Three good reasons to implement good, sustainable building design practices. The building industry accounts for approximately 40 per cent of the world’s energy consumption – 28 per cent in Australia – and also generates 30 per cent of the world’s waste and 30 per cent of the world’s carbon emissions. Clearly, the impact of buildings on our environment is significant and there’s plenty of scope to minimise that impact. There’s another good reason: because school buildings are the perfect choice to do that. They’re usually low height, low technology, have plenty of open space and access to natural light, and often live a very long life. The third reason? Schools also have a particularly significant impact in that they shape children’s ideas about their built environment, so school architecture is an enormous opportunity to inspire students and help them engage with their natural environment. It would be hard to find a better recent example to illustrate those three reasons in action than Williamstown High School, Melbourne. In 2005, Victoria’s Department of Education and Early Childhood Devel- opment (DEECD), the Victorian govern- ment and the Williamstown High School community committed $11 million to rede- velop the school using principles of envi- ronmental sustainability. The mandate for the Williams town High School project was to create a model school for environmental education, both in its built form and in the curriculum offered to students. The vision The school community at Williamstown High School, led by a proactive school prin- cipal, Steve Cook, had a very strong vision for the project and this informed the design and construction process throughout. That vision was: to take up the challenge of providing for ? a sustainable future to build an outstanding middle years ? school for environmental education to inspire involvement in environmental ? programs that will engender excitement, pride and knowledge of Victoria’s envi- ronment, and to develop a Marine Education Centre to ? serve students across the Victoria. The client group drew on resources far wider than the usual school building com- munity and selected consultants for their commitment to environmentally-sustainable design rather than traditional school design. This led to a fresh approach to both build- ing design and pedagogy as the project team constantly challenged the notion of what is good school design. The immediate architectural challenge was to design a campus that embraced both the school’s vision and environmental objectives, and that could be built within a DEECD budget. The environmentally- sustainable design concept for the school was to use passive environmental princi- ples and well-tested materials in innovative ways, rather than cutting-edge technologies, to provide an accessible and economical model for use in future schools. Environmentally-sustainable design is more than just saving energy and turning off the air-conditioners. We now have a suite of tools – the Green Star rating tools produced by the Green Building Council of Australia (GBCA) – to help us rate how sustainable a building is. The Green Star rating tools take into consideration energy consump- tion, water usage, indoor air quality and thermal comfort, materials and furniture, how we dispose of waste, transportation, the ecology of the site and, importantly, how we manage our facilities. Williamstown High School was selected as one of six educational facilities in the country to pilot a newly-released Green Star education tool. Participation in this process prompted much-needed discussion between the DEECD, GBCA and consult- ants to help formulate both an appropriate rating tool and also a series of mandatory environmentally-sustainable design require- ments for all future schools based on lessons learned at Williamstown High School.